Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has covered world politics and economics for 30 years, based in Europe, the US, and Latin America. He joined the Telegraph in 1991, serving as Washington correspondent and later Europe correspondent in Brussels. He is now International Business Editor in London. Subscribe to the City Briefing e-mail.

Whether or not you think the Swiss are wise to shut out EU migrants, their referendum over the weekend does at least demolish one exasperating myth.

Can anybody continue to say with a straight face that the sovereignty of Switzerland (or Norway) is fictitious, that the country always has to go along with EU policy even though it is not a member of the Union?

The Swiss have just shown this to be untrue. Their legally-binding act of defiance will have major consequences for the Brexit debate here in Britain.

If a landlocked country of eight million people, surrounded on all side by EU countries, can pull off a quota restriction, then it is obvious that an Atlantic island of 63 million can also do it.

All that stops the British nation from implementing such curbs – if it so wishes – is the membership code of the EU treaty club. We signed up to free movement of people, but we can unsign at any time should those rules (not "Laws", as the European Court tries to pretend) become irksome.

(The legal office of the European Central Bank (oddly) asserts that Britain cannot now leave the EU because a long period of settled membership creates modified status quo under the convention of treaties.
It claims that there is now a “new legal order”. This transcends a “largely obsolete concept of sovereignty” and imposes a “permanent limitation” on states’ rights. Needless to say, I reject this assertion as unsound, but if these ECB claims were remotely true, the implication would be that Britain must leave the EU immediately or see its exit prerogative yet further diminished.)

Nigel Farage celebrated the Swiss vote as "wonderful news for national sovereignty and freedom lovers throughout Europe." Indeed he might, for it demonstrates that sovereignty matters, just as the EMU horror story shows what can happen to economies once they loose sovereign control of their currency, central bank, and fiscal policy.

Personally, I am relaxed about EU migrants. They are mostly well-educated, young and hard-working, and a boon to our economy. Some stay, helping to close our demographic deficit. They are exactly what ageing countries need as they face a toxic mix of ballooning pension costs at the same time as a shrinking workforce/tax base over the next two decades.

We should welcome and love them. Even social Darwinians should be pleased since these are self-selected people, marked their willingness to master a foreign language (English), with the gumption to leave home and search for a job abroad. Woe betide those countries in southern Europe that are losing these bright young people.

There is of course a point of cultural saturation. Even immigrant societies such as the US have had to turn off the tap from time to time over the centuries. The US did so for a generation after the mass arrivals from Italy and Eastern Europe before the First World War. Every nation has to protect its core cohesion. As Teddy Roosevelt said, the US must never become a "polyglot boarding house".

I agree with Mats that this is a possible risk, but I also think the balance of advantage is moving back to the sovereign democracies. The EU is a paper tiger, as Putin and Yanukovich have just demonstrated in Ukraine, with an all too blunt corroboration from the US State Department's "F-Europe" Victoria Nuland. It bends to superior political will if confronted.

So let us decide the immigration debate on its proper merits. What Brussels has to say on the matter is of minor academic interest at this stage. We are not still afraid of EU shadows on the wall are we, boys and girls?